Bernard Wasserstein

Bernard Wasserstein is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (Profile). His new book, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard UP), appears this spring.

This is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein presented a disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. He showed how the harsh realities of the age devastated the lives of communities and individuals. By 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack.
Ranging from Vilna (‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’) to Salonica with its Judeo...

Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the first full history of how the Danish people managed to rescue the lives of 95% of the country’s Jewish population. Like her Danish counterparts, Gertrude van Tijn, the subject of Bernard Wasserstein’s The Ambiguity of Virtue, rescued Jewish lives. Working for the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam, however, she was denounced by some as a collaborator. Both are exceptionally heroic tales of bravery, attesting to the incredible moral fortitude of s...